Family Broadcasting Company of Fairfield, Iowa, applied in June 1984 for a construction permit to build channel 17 in Grand Island.

By 1989, Jerry Montgomery, the owner of Family Broadcasting, intended for the station to be an affiliate of Fox and hoped it would carry Kansas City Royals baseball.

[6][7] During the soft launch, the station broadcast for eight hours each weekday with no recording capability; every single program aired had to be carried live from a satellite feed until appropriate equipment was installed.

George Singleton, who was intended to become general manager of NTV once the sale was finalized, had already relocated to Grand Island.

[16][12] Pappas Telecasting took over KTVG's operations on July 1, 1996, after it agreed to purchase NTV from Fant and immediately assumed control under an LMA; that September, Pappas converted KSNB-TV—as well as its translators in Beatrice and Lincoln—from a satellite of KHGI to satellite of KTVG, expanding the availability of Fox programming in central Nebraska.

[18] KTVG and KSNB-TV dropped the secondary UPN affiliation in January 1998;[19] however, the network's programming returned to the stations in 2000.

On June 12, 2009, Pappas converted KCWL-TV, an affiliate of The CW it managed in Lincoln, to Fox Nebraska as KFXL-TV.

[26] With Fox network coverage shifted to KFXL and the NTV transmitters, the operations agreements Pappas held to run KSNB-TV and KTVG-TV were allowed to expire.

[31] The FCC canceled its license on April 22, 2014; this was due to the 2012 expiration of both its construction permit for its post-digital transition facility on channel 16 (which had been tolled due to a bankruptcy proceeding Hill Broadcasting was involved in) and special temporary authority to continue operating its pre-transition channel 19 digital facility, not operating for over a year, and failure to file for license renewal.